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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#221

Post by valleyer »

hartator wrote: post #215

I am hearing a lot of stories about why youngster are overrated but not really a lot the other way around. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion here. In reality, young people are less paid than older counterparts in almost every economic sectors for the same skills. I mean that'a known truth! Silicon valley is the opposite? Good for the them. I think there is 2 strong biases against older founders that might explain the s…

> In their forties, you might expect him to make something like 350k and have a good title like CTO or lead developer.

What? There are quite obviously not as many CTO or "lead developer" positions as there are junior engineering positions. So why are you assuming that everyone that old must have such a great job?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#223

Post by pkolaczk »

tsotha wrote: post #98
ChuckMcM wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a huge part of it, folks who stop "keeping up" with the technology eventually find there is a huge amount of catching up to do. When that happens, especially if there isn't a lot of runway, it can be difficult. I remark to folks all the time that you can take someone right out of high school, and have them spend about 2000 hrs learning about "computers" and now they are 'hot shot programmers' that are…

>Had they instead spent that six months re-tuning old talents, sending out the occasional resume, and building stuff, that seems to get people hired regardless of age. There are two problems with that logic. The first is if you have only six months of experience doing something your pay is likely to reflect that. Second, look at it from an employer's perspective. You can hire a twenty year old or a fifty year old. Th…

"They have the same experience with whatever the latest thing is."

This assumption is wrong. They don't have the same experience. Their direct experience (counted as the time they spent hacking with the latest thing) might be exactly the same, but this doesn't translate to the same effective experience / capability. When I was 20, it took me much longer to become productive with any new thing than it is now when I'm 30. A 20-year old with a 6-month experience with a new language would struggle a lot even with basic concepts. A 30 (or better 40) year old, who already knows 10 other languages and a ton of frameworks would pick it up in single days or weeks and became productive very fast, leaving him much more time to dig into the advanced concepts.

When I was about 18 years old, I struggled hard with a math proof related to number theory a teacher gave me. I never solved it then when I was at school and soon moved on to some other things. Recently, when on vacation I recalled that puzzle and started thinking about it just for fun. I solved it in a few minutes by just drawing with a stick on the sand. I never studied theoretical maths nor dealt with it professionally, so I had no direct experience in doing math proofs. Somehow, my capability now is much better than it was 10 years ago. I call it "indirect experience".

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#224

Post by alphadevx »

Recently I interviewed a candidate, who upon meeting me said "Oh, I was expecting somebody older". It seems it cuts both ways: if you are a manager you are supposed to appear "older", otherwise some people have difficulty reporting into you.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#225

Post by zacinbusiness »

aortega wrote: post #139
Retric wrote: post #8

The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…

Not so much. I'm 35, started programming at about 10 in my TI99-4A, typing games from magazines, etc. the usual stuff. No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming, unless he was working at Microsoft or IBM at that date, and surely they are about less than 10000 of those guys in the world. Of course there are 40 year olds that may have way more experience than me in a specific language…

I'm sorry, what? If a guy has been doing a job for longer than you then he can't possibly have more experience than you? Isn't "experience" "doing"?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#226

Post by zacinbusiness »

It's stories like this that make me hope that I will bust out a killer app within the next year or two. As a programmer I've been hacking at code since my late teens, just like most devs, but I never took it seriously until about 5 years ago. And I've been designing my app for 2 years now and I think it's almost ready to put into development. But I don't want to release a piece of junk, and yet I also don't want someone to release it before I can finish.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#227

Post by jmd_ »

I'm curious when I read these articles: does this also mean making a career switch, or maybe attempting to start a career, in programming post 30 (with or without a degree) is incredibly improbable? Does that ring true to people here?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#228

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nahname wrote: post #104
Retric wrote: post #8

The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…

>I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Are you sure you are not committing the same ageist judgement here?

He's just making an observation and a possible correlation (X competent people, 3 younger than 30), not a causation (X people were incompetent because they were younger than 30).

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#229

Post by troels »

Gormo wrote: post #148
aortega wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much. I'm 35, started programming at about 10 in my TI99-4A, typing games from magazines, etc. the usual stuff. No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming, unless he was working at Microsoft or IBM at that date, and surely they are about less than 10000 of those guys in the world. Of course there are 40 year olds that may have way more experience than me in a specific language…

Computer technology is about 60 years old, though. There were people doing some pioneering work in the 50s and 60s, and the modern hacker culture really has its roots in the 1970s, just prior to the rise of personal computing. There was lots of stuff going on with the DEC minicomputers, LISP machines, early UNIX systems, and big-iron mainframes long before most of us were even born, let alone getting our starts on TI…

Assuming Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, programming as a discipline is more like 160 years old.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#230

Post by Cthulhu_ »

yeukhon wrote: post #217
bsder wrote: post #201

There are two perceived problems with hiring older programmers: 1) Older programmers won't put up with bullshit. They expect to have reasonable goals, be listened to, be compensated fairly, and have a reasonable schedule. They've been around the block enough to identify bullshit and will leave when it starts getting too high. 2) Older programmers really don't always understand the "cool" social crap that teenagers ar…

What is this social crap we are talking about? Are you referring to social network applications?

"I just committed #code on #master! #yolo!"
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